Blog Roll

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Discover some of the most versatile animals on the planet in Spiders Alive!, a new immersive exhibition opening at the Museum on Saturday, July 28. Watch the video below for a peek at some of the live spiders that will be on display.

What inspires scientists and innovators? On July 19, First Comes the Dream, a celebration of New York City’s emergence as a premier technology center, brought luminaries from science, technology, and media to the Museum to find out.

Co-hosted by the Museum with leading tech blog Gizmodo and social networking app Foursquare, the evening began in the Hayden Planetarium with remarks from Museum President Ellen Futter, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, and New York City Deputy Mayor Robert Steel before launching the awe-struck audience on a tour of the universe with the Museum’s Director of Astrovisualization Carter Emmart.

Next, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Museum’s Hayden Planetarium, sat down for an interview with iO9’s Annalee Newitz in the Cullman Hall of the Universe. In the video below, find out what sparked Dr. Tyson’s interest in astronomy and what he thinks the future of space exploration might hold.

Skin is the body’s largest organ, and one with a complex cultural and evolutionary past. In this SciCafe from the spring, biological anthropologist Nina Jablonski discusses how human skin evolved, particularly as an adaptation to ultraviolet radiation.

A new model shows how an elusive type of black hole can form in the gas surrounding its supermassive counterparts.

In research published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, scientists from the American Museum of Natural History, the City University of New York (CUNY), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics propose that intermediate-mass black holes—light-swallowing celestial objects with masses ranging from hundreds to many thousands of times the mass of the Sun—can grow in the gas disks around supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. The physical mechanism parallels the model astrophysicists use to describe the growth of giant planets in the gas disks surrounding stars.

Have a question for a paleontologist? On July 18, head over to leading technology blog Gizmodo at 1:30 pm for a chance to ask the Museum’s Provost of Science Michael Novacek what led him to become interested in his field, and anything else you wanted to know about paleontology but were afraid to ask.

Nearly 20 years ago, Dr. Novacek was one of the discoverers of the Gobi Desert’s Ukhaa Tolgod, the richest Cretaceous fossil vertebrate site in the world. He has also led paleontological expeditions to Baja California, Mexico; the Andes Mountains of Chile; and the Yemen Arab Republic in search of fossil mammals and dinosaurs.

Earlier this month, blogs Gizmodo and iO9 launched What Was It, is a series of short interviews that asks the luminaries of science and technology what inspired them. Read interviews with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, and astronaut Mae Jemison, then join the conversation with Dr. Novacek on July 18 at Gizmodo.com.